Mastodawn

Clive Thompson Nov 9, 2022

If anyone finds something cool, screenshot it and share it (with alt-text describing what it is!)

https://daily.ds106.us/tdc3676/

Alan Levine Jan 21, 2024

@clive I love the weird old book finder, the generative randomness is more enjoyable than the artificially flavored kinds.

We did a #ds106 #dailycreate with it, and before the death knell of the twitter API, there are responses

@cogdog

Omg people found such cool stuff!!!

Your WOBF has the generative value of a divination deck — surprising juxtapositions of things that were actually made by a person with a craft intent. A jambalaya or smorgasbord of the arts.

The modern artificial stuff is more like Soylent (movie or modern version) slurry, made in a factory from ground-up things that might once have been part of a craft intent

@cogdog

Alan Levine

@trochee @clive Well said! Spicy jambalaya over bland mush soup.

@trochee @cogdog

I like this formulation, yes!

I often find I enjoy tools that marry human intent to just a *small* bit of randomness

Like a psychogeographic walk through culture

Yes, see also @oblique_strategies , which uses randomness to select an "unsticking" strategy

I've even found that "flip a coin" is a helpful decision-unblocker because I can introspect about my sense of disappointment (or relief) that I have in reaction to the arbitrary oracle's decision

@cogdog

@trochee @oblique_strategies @cogdog

super cool

I have a copy of the original reissued oblique strategies deck kicking around here somewhere

Jealous, a little

@trochee @oblique_strategies @cogdog

And I love that coin-flip idea -- as a spur to introspection about how one would feel on either forking path

There's a scene in BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM where they explain that the therapists 've worked Two-Face off his coin, onto dice, and eventually onto a Tarot deck, so that his decision-making can be more nuanced and less destructive

Sometimes I feel like we're all Two-Face, at different points along the scale

(In the comic, though, Dent is completely paralyzed with indecision as a result of this intervention)

https://github.com/cogdog/edtechaphors

Alan Levine Jan 21, 2024

@clive @trochee I've built a fleet of silly generators that have an interesting 2 layers of randomness, one to pull from sets of words, but a second to have random sentence structures.

They are more fun to build than to use ;-)

GitHub - cogdog/edtechaphors: A Mashup generator made for Martin Weller

A Mashup generator made for Martin Weller. Contribute to cogdog/edtechaphors development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

@cogdog @clive

Back in the day I wrote a random haiku detector that scanned Twitter (for consenting accounts) and reposted if it estimated that you'd tweeted a haiku